Google Cloud launches Lending DocAI to streamline mortgage applications with AI

Google today unveiled Lending DocAI, a specialized Google Cloud solution for the mortgage industry that ostensibly provides “industry-leading” accuracy for documents relevant to lending and processing income. The company says the solution can reduce mortgage processing times, streamline data capture and enrichment, and support various regulatory and customer data compliance requirements.

“Our goal is to give you the right tools to help borrowers and lenders have a better experience and to close mortgage loans in shorter time frames, benefiting all parties involved,” Google Cloud product manager Sudheera Vanguri said in a statement. “With Lending DocAI, you will reduce mortgage processing time and costs, streamline data capture, and support regulatory and compliance requirements.”

Lending institutions like banks and brokers process hundreds of pages of paperwork for every loan. It’s a heavily manual process that adds thousands of dollars to the cost of issuing a loan. While hardly flawless, automated processing can give customers a degree of confidence they can afford the property they’re interested in, and some lenders are able to complete the ordeal within minutes as opposed to the weeks it once took.

Lending DocAI, which is now in preview, is a specialized solution in Google’s Document AI portfolio that leverages a set of models focused on document types in mortgage lending. Google says it can increase operational efficiency in the loan process by speeding up mortgage workflows like loan origination and mortgage servicing to process loans and automate repetitive data capture. It’s also able to reduce the complexity of document process automation by enabling applications to be processed across stages of the mortgage lifecycle. And it can streamline data capture in key mortgage processes such as document verification and underwriting.

Google is partnering with Roostify, a mortgage software platform, to make Lending DocAI available to customers like Santander Bank and Hamilton Home Loans. “The mortgage industry is still early in transitioning from traditional, manual processes to digitally enabled and automated, and we believe that transformation will happen much more quickly with the power of AI. And if you are going to do AI, you’ve got to go Google,” Roostify CEO Rajesh Bhat said.

The release of Lending DocAI comes after Google launched PPP Lending AI, an effort to help lenders expedite the processing of applications for the since-exhausted U.S. Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Paycheck Protection Program. As Google explained at the time in a whitepaper, AI can automate the handling of volumes of loan applications by identifying patterns that would take a human worker longer to spot. Specifically, PPP Lending AI could classify and extract data in critical paperwork before readying documents for submission to the SBA.